Do you know what API is & How API benefit us?
API is a tool that is most complex yet frequently used.
In short, It is the brain of the machine.
An API just like a car/bike’s control unit. It send signals/message to the engine from the input of the driver.
When a driver step on the gas, the control unit send signals to the engine to the combustion engine thus moving the vehicle forward. The dedicate input of the driver foot to the pedal send different signals to the engine to determine the amount of fuel injected and air sucking in to produce the power for lateral acceleration. Not only it controls the engine but also various part of the vehicle such as air-condition, safety lock/unlock, windows, tyre monitoring pressure system, airbag system etc.
Can you imagine a car without a control unit?
There will be no remote control, keyless start ignition instead a traditional keys to unlock and starting a car by cranking the key to the keyhole.
Benefits of API
The end day, uses of API is to make our lives easier and convenient.
- Connectivity & Productivity
- Innovation
- Marketing
- Cost
- Customer/client experience
Connectivity & Productivity
API boast connectivity and productivity just like a car example where modern key fob can be use to display many parameters of the vehicle status as compared to early days manual key fob that serve only specific purpose thus increase productivity through many uses.
Innovation
API allow business to be creative & innovate new products / services to meet customer’s demand and explore new avenue for growth / revenue. Gartner affirms that APIs are important in reducing the friction usually caused by a bimodal IT strategy; that is, where legacy systems (Mode 1) are run alongside flexible, innovative solutions and approaches (Mode 2).
APIs can act as the connecting layer that allows for a more coherent interaction of the two modes, leading to the deployment of innovative and feature-rich applications. With APIs, you can flawlessly extract value from legacy data sources and enhance your current systems’ capabilities.
Marketing
While opening up to new avenue of products / services, API allow them to expand their reach and penetrate new market frontiers that otherwise could not have been fronted.
For example, IBM released the Watson API to allow developers to take advantage of its state-of-the-art AI technology and implement it into various use cases. As a result, IBM has galvanized a large number of third-parties and expanded its reach in a wide range of industries, including travel, shopping, and medical care etc.
Cost
The greatest benefits of APIs for businesses is the ability to save costs. Since APIs significantly reduce the development effort, using them to create applications is a great way of reducing costs.
Consuming APIs frees developers to concentrate on refining the unique capabilities of their apps faster, which assists enterprises to save resources and money.
Customer/client experience
By leveraging APIs’ capabilities, businesses can create new and effective ways of interacting with client / customers, especially in the current digital age when consumers demand top-notch experiences.
With APIs, developers can create solutions that meet specific client expectations, something that could be difficult to achieve without them.
For example, many brands use APIs to deploy innovative artificial intelligence and predictive analytics technology that analyzes a buyer’s unique journey and recommends the “next possible action”. This improves the customers’ shopping experience and yields more sales.
Example of API uses:
Have you seen advertisement pop-up whenever you visit social media platforms like Facebook?
In this example of API, we are going to demonstrate how to harness the capabilities of Facebook ads API.
Over 6 million advertisers are using Facebook Marketing as Facebook offers highly specific targeting capabilities combined with the massive reach to be able to scale winning campaigns. However it is not easy as it sound to start campaigning your advertisement.
There is multiple purpose to leverage Facebook Advertising data:
- Performance Measurement
- Analytics Insight (such Attribution Modeling)
- Customer Profile Enrichment
These require a different set of information from Facebook. While it is possibilities to exports campaign performance data from Facebook’s Ads Manager backend, the process can quickly become time consuming and cumbersome if you are running operations at different scale and use multiple accounts.
Facebook’s API automate the process of sourcing the data to empower these use cases. Performance monitoring can then be done on a daily basis, merging the data with other channel information. Ad Spend time series can then be used to automate the training of an attribution model, and Customer Profile can then be automatically populated based on targeting information from Facebook.
Ad Insight Reports
Ad insight reports can be run from the Ad API. These provide performance reports for your specific account and allow you to define the fields you want to extract as well as the granularity of the information. These can be defined in a parameters dictionary.
This dataset provides a holistic of the performance of our ads across different metrics; previously defined custom metrics would also fall within the actions dictionary.
Targeting Settings
Facebook offers extensive targeting options for their ads, from the basic targeting setting such location, age, gender, and language to more advanced like those based on custom audiences or behavioral or interest-based characteristics.
These options offer data on user demographic & behavioral characteristics that can help personalize the website or get a better on the performance of the campaign using these characteristics to gaining an understanding of value for different user segments.
There is ton of things you can do from the data provided through the Facebook API. From generating standard performance report, combining it with other data to run attribution models, or to giving personalization on the website for users which have been targeted.
In Conclusion,
The business benefits of APIs are vast. They are powerful tool that allow businesses to generate a good return on investment. APIs have become a critical catalyst that drives the advances of most modern organizations. Separating the contender from the pretender.
It’s what you need to revolutionize the way you do business in the current digital age.
Want to know how API can benefit your data and your business? Chat with us more about API X Data Analytics!
